Romantics at Tate Britain, review

The re-hang of Tate Britain’s Clore Galleries is an infuriating shambles. Rating: *
 
By Richard Dorment

It will be interesting to see whether Tate Britain’s new director, Penelope Curtis, can do anything about the curse of the Clore Gallery. This museum-within-a-museum housing Turner’s bequest to the nation of 300 oil paintings and more than 20,000 works on paper opened in 1987 to a chorus of boos from the critics. In fact, the building itself isn’t too bad; the problem is that the architect, James Stirling, put the bloomin’ thing in exactly the wrong place – to the side of the original 1897 gallery set back from the front entrance.

The positioning of the new building destroyed the integrity of the rest of collection by hamstringing the Tate’s ability to tell the story of British art in chronological order. However you hang the permanent collection, it is now impossible to place Turner where he belongs – smack in the middle, surrounded by the work of the artists he imitated, competed with and inspired.
So I was sympathetic to the idea of a major re-hang of the Clore Galleries that placed Turner alongside contemporaries such as David Wilkie, Samuel Palmer, Richard Dadd and William Etty. Had the new displays been organised by people with the smallest interest in art as a visual experience, it could have worked beautifully. As it is, Romantics is a complete shambles.

Tacita Dean’s Tate Christmas tree is a beacon for British art

(The Guardian)

By Jonathan Jones

Honest, simple and transient – Tacita Dean’s Christmas tree installation at Tate Britain is a profound statement from a brilliant artist

Passing time … artist Tacita Dean in front of the tree she has created for Tate Britain.

Tacita Dean is an artist I revere. This year, she’s done the Tate Christmas tree; it is typical of her unostentatious and honest art. An ordinary Christmas tree stands in the entrance hall of London’s Tate Britain. Its only unusual aspect is to be lit by real candles, instead of electric fairylights. Lit every day at 4pm, the candles burn down as the sun sets. Time visibly passes.

Unpretentious, melancholy, exact, Dean’s Christmas tree lightly brushes against themes of transience, reality and truth that are at the heart of her work. She has written that everything she likes is “analogue” – as opposed to digital. She adapts the metaphor of an analogue tape recorder to describe any form of art that exists in real time. Against the spirit of our virtual, ethereal age, she upholds the real. She makes films on real celluloid – and has lyrically filmed an abandoned film processing plant. From the start of her career she also made drawings: her blackboard drawings of an imagined film set on a ship on a stormy sea have become treasures of the Tate collection, their plain drawing style and belief in narrative effortlessly going against any fashion you can think of.

Dean’s works on paper – photographs drowning in gouache or composed in cinematic visions inscribed with Twombly-like arcana – have since evolved into some of the most powerful works being made anywhere this century.

I first encountered her vision at the same museum where her tree now flickers and gutters. One of the first reviews I ever wrote was of her installation Foley Artist, in the Art Now room at the Tate (it hadn’t yet become Tate Britain). Already, the idea of analogue recording seemed central to what she was doing. On film, two “foley artists” were recreating the sounds of a thunderstorm by waving pieces of cardboard and crunching gravel, while old tape machines were displayed in the gallery. It was a work of art that engaged your imagination and emotions – one of the truly significant works of 1990s British art – and since then she has only got better. She’s one of the major artists of our time.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/jonathanjonesblog/2009/dec/15/tacita-dean-christmas-tree-tate-britain

Tate chief Will Gompertz to perform solo comedy show at Edinburgh Fringe

http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/specials/edinburgh/article6741973.ece
Ben Hoyle, Arts Correspondent

Will Gompertz is a happily married and apparently sane father of four with a prestigious position at the centre of the British art world. By rights he should be sunning himself somewhere luxurious, reflecting on another successful year for Tate galleries, where he is director of media.

Instead he has given up his summer holiday and, starting today, is risking his reputation and mental wellbeing by performing a solo comedy show in one of the most unforgiving, competitive bearpits in the entertainment world — the Edinburgh Fringe.

Why would anyone in his position do that? “I’m really looking forward to it,” he said yesterday, managing to sound breezily convincing. “It’s an absolute privilege to be here. What’s so fantastic about the festival is that anybody can take part. It’s like being on a tiny stage at Glastonbury or part of the tubby mass of humanity following the elite runners round the London marathon.”

The build-up to Edinburgh Festival month has been grim, marred by construction work on a tramline that cuts the city in half, predictions of low spending by audiences and a binmen’s strike that has led to piles of rubbish mounting up in the streets.

But the mood in Edinburgh has transformed in recent days. Ticket sales are 20 per cent up on 2007, the Fringe’s best ever year. A total of 2,098 shows from 60 countries are taking part in the festival, with Gompertz one of 979 acts making their Fringe debut. Some 265 venues are lined up, including an island in the Firth of Forth, a London bus, a fudge shop and a public lavatory.

Double Art History with Mr Gompertz is staged in a classroom. The set-up is that the audience are pupils facing a history of art exam and Gompertz is a supply teacher standing in for their hopeless regular teacher, who has suffered a nervous breakdown.

In just under an hour he promises to unpack more than 100 years of modern and contemporary art history and theory into a narrative sufficiently digestible for the audience to pass an actual brief exam at the end.

In Fringe publicity parlance it’s “27 art movement ‘isms in 55 minutes, plus a lot of antics and humour, a bit of theatre and some drawing”.

“The point is not to convince people of what they should and should not like,” Gompertz said. “The excitement about art is that you can make your own mind up but what people struggle with is why some things are art. I want to show them.”

Along the way audiences will discover Primitivism, Orphism, Automatism, Fluxus and by the end of the hour they should be able to relate Eighties Neo-Expressionism back to Van Gogh and Post-Impressionism. Maybe.

The idea came out of an invitation to deliver a series of art lectures on some P&O cruises in the Caribbean and Europe last year. “To make them slightly more interesting I signed up for a comedy course on the top floor of a London pub to find out how comedians bring different subjects alive and engage their audience.”

“A friend of mine in TV asked if I wanted to do stand-up in Edinburgh and I said, ‘Not a chance’. But then I thought about it and decided that an amusing lecture might work.”

He is at the Fringe as himself rather than as an ambassador for Tate, but his family may yet have to get used to holidays in Scotland. “I’m not expecting glowing reviews but if it goes reasonably well I might come back.”

So far the show has had one preview, this week in front of family and friends in the packed front room of a rented holiday cottage on the Hebridean island of Colonsay. “I got heckled a lot,” he said. “It was a bit too long and I didn’t get through it but it was fun and everybody got 100 per cent on their exams. And they really didn’t all know about Constructivism and Duchamp’s urinal beforehand.”

Tickets for Double Art History with Mr Gompertz are available at www.underbelly.co.uk